Big Tobacco Smuggling

During 2000 and 2001, a team of reporters from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists broke a series of landmark stories exposing how leading tobacco companies worked with criminal networks to smuggle cigarettes around the world.

Relying on interviews with insiders and thousands of internal industry documents, the unique team - based in six countries - pieced together how smuggling played a key role in big tobacco's strategy to boost sales and increase market share. Those revelations, and others that followed, helped prompt lawsuits and government inquiries, and led to promises of a global crackdown on the illegal trade in tobacco.

The series was reprinted or written about in more than 40 publications in 10 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, the U.K., and the United States.

Here are Duncan's contributions to the ICIJ 'Big Tobacco Smuggling' series, from its first stories in 2000 on industry involvement in smuggling to the exposés of 2001 revealing big tobacco’s collusion with Colombian drug cartels, the Italian Mafia, and North American motorcycle gangs. The full investigation can be found on the ICIJ website - links are on the right-hand side.

The British government is considering launching an in-depth investigation into "extremely serious" allegations of international tobacco smuggling by giant tobacco multinational BAT (British American Tobacco).

A year-long investigation by the ICIJ shows that tobacco company officials at BAT, Philip Morris, and R.J. Reynolds have worked closely with companies and individuals directly connected to organized crime

He was sacked at the end of 1999. In the ensuing row, the company, Romar Freezone Trading, accused him of incompetence, fraud, alcoholism and blackmail. Attempts were made to threaten him and, he says, to set him up on assault or drugs possession charges.

BAT's Kenneth Clarke was called before the Commons all-party health committee, chaired by Labour MP David Hinchliffe, after the original disclosure that BAT stood accused of complicity in cigarette smuggling.